MEEKER: Sex education on the path to revision?

OP-ED:

Those damn kids. There they go again - children having children. We’ve told them about condoms and oral contraceptives, but clearly they haven’t heard, so we’d better ramp up our efforts one more time. We need more money in the classrooms to educate them and convince teachers to step up to the plate. Doctors, too must be on board- to coerce, immunize and write prescriptions - so that we don’t have to deal with the reoccurring problem of kids having kids.

When the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that teen pregnancy was once again on the rise, it is telling that the announcement came out shortly after Jamie Lynn Spears and baby appeared on the cover of US magazine. Some (myself included) blame Hollywood for the glamorization of teen pregnancy, championing it to bored and confused girls as a ready solution to many of life’s ills. After all, swollen bellies bring attention - usually in the form of oohs and ahhs - if not a bit of pity. The problem is, young girls don’t care which type of attention follows, they just relish whatever they can get, because most know too well, that life without it is far too painful to bear.

In my early years of treating teen girls, my colleagues in major medical centers used to joke about putting birth control in the drinking water. We were the ones, we believed, who could offer real solutions. Syringes loaded with Depo-Provera, convincing arguments about the efficacy of condoms and oral contraceptives were only a small portion of our fully loaded armamentarium.

And we’ve also enjoyed the enthusiastic efforts of well-meaning teachers and sex educators in the schools. They, the ones who really understand teens, march into classrooms and high-school gymnasiums with the fervor of missionaries intent on convincing kids that, really, sex is absolutely normal during the teen years and affords little risk if handled “responsibly.” They have to tell kids this; after all, that’s how we all lived.

We have two disturbing dynamics evidenced in all of these discussions. First, boys are approached as out-of-control sex maniacs devoid of emotions or even a minute semblance of self-control. Second, boys infer through an educator’s subtle inflection (or through a not so subtle magazine cover) that they really don’t matter any way in the big scheme of things. After all, pregnancy is a girl’s problem. Jamie Lynn and baby grace magazine pages, not her baby’s dad. Why? Is it because boys are irresponsible deadbeats? Absolutely not. They are purposely discarded by those who view them as unnecessary. Many adult mothers don’t need them to help raise children, so why should teen mothers? While sex educators and physicians (I am both of these) frantically regroup and try to figure out a better tactic with these crazy kids, perhaps we should look in a completely different direction. Could it be that we, not the kids, are the ones who aren’t getting things right? Ouch.

Take a closer look at the girls in Gloucester, Mass. (who, by the way, all used boys/men to meet their own ends.) These girls were educated about birth control, safe sex, even safer sex. Still, scads got themselves pregnant. They wanted to become pregnant. Was it for attention? Sure, but that was simply the beginning. These girls were creating families. Communities. Little girls wanted other little girls and boys to keep them company and to give them a reason to wake up in the morning. Let’s not miss the deeper picture here. They, like all the other children having babies, got pregnant, not because they knew too little about birth control, but because they - like millions of their peers - were painfully lonely and bored.

And why is this generation of kids so lonely? Because we have left them alone. We work and play, pursue our dreams, make certain to carve out time for relaxation and frantically condense all of these into 18 critical years. We must, we believe, because none of us wants to postpone pleasure.

It is high time that we adults face the music. We can no longer allow two critical mistakes to continue. First, we must stop the denigration of boys everywhere. They matter. Their thoughts, opinions and everything masculine about them matters tremendously. It isn’t just the girls and babies who count. Second, we cannot continue to allow kids to raise themselves while we live life around them, hoping that a few conversations about safer sex will suffice to keep them from having babies. We must give them more of our time and ourselves. Because if we continue to allow them to drift in their loneliness, we all lose.

Dr. Meg Meeker, is a pediatrician and author.